


you are a rare, rare find

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Character Death Fix, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Clothed Sex, Coulson is a ghost but it's okay, Cousy Fix-It, F/M, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, Ghost Sex, Mention of Mental Illness, POV Phil Coulson, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post Season 5, Romance, also not Jemma Simmons friendly, it's only a line but just in case, shameless shippy excuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 05:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16257209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: Coulson comes back as a ghost, but only Daisy can see him.Written for the Cousy Fix-It week at johnsonandcoulson.com - Prompt: ghost/afterlife





	you are a rare, rare find

“I felt that,” Daisy says, touching her cheek, the way someone would bring their fingertips to a slight burn. “How did I feel that?”

“I felt that too.”

Coulson recoils, staring at his own hand. It looks the same, pale, almost transparent. For a moment he thinks he has imagined it, the briefest contact. But Daisy felt it too, and her cheek was hot when Coulson pressed his thumb against it. He didn’t even think about it. He didn’t remember he couldn’t do that. That it was no use. He shouldn’t have been able to feel that.

Ghost aren’t supposed to feel anything.

 

+++

 

_He didn’t remember anything from the moment he died until he appeared in Daisy’s room a few weeks ago, waking up as if from a long, long rest._

_At first she couldn’t hear him. She looked so sad and the only thing Coulson wanted was to say something that would comfort her. He had been trying to get her to notice his presence for hours but nothing had worked._

_By that time he had figured out he was dead — he remembered — and that he was a ghost, for lack of a better description._

_It didn’t feel much different from being alive, except it did, it was like everything was watered down, it was such a cliche but it was like the world was a faded photocopy of the world he had known before. No, not the world. The world was fine. He was the problem. He felt numb and without any weight. But at least he was here. And he really wanted to be here. He didn’t want to be dead anymore._

_“Great, now I’m hearing you as well,” Daisy said the first time he managed to speak to her, convinced that she was imagining it._

_It didn’t take much to change her mind, though. Admittedly, Coulson knew how much she wanted to believe he was there, back with her._

_Daisy wanted to tell the others immediately, put the scientists on the case as soon as possible. That was when they found out that no one else could hear Coulson, no one else could see him. To the rest of the team Daisy was pointing at the air, talking to herself._

_Everybody thought she was crazy at first. They didn’t use that word — though Simmons argued that Daisy didn’t “have the best track record, when it comes to mental health” and Coulson watched Daisy take a step back as if slapped, realizing she was talking about her medical file, a file that was supposed to be confidential to anyone but Coulson and Andrew. Coulson tried to say something then, but of course only Daisy could hear him. They didn’t say she was crazy, but they called it grief._

_Daisy proved she wasn’t seeing things, and it was a relief to herself as well (because despite all their conversations in her room she wasn’t sure this wasn’t a breakdown). It was easy to set up an experiment where Coulson simply went to another room and then back and told Daisy what was in a box or written in a piece of paper Daisy couldn’t possibly have access to. So either Daisy had suddenly become psychic or she was able to communicate with a ghost. Both were equally impossible so the team chose to finally believe Daisy’s story._

_“But why can’t anyone else see him, hear him? Why just me?” she asked._

_No one wanted to meet her eyes in that moment. Like they could think of an answer but they didn’t want to say in front of Daisy. Coulson wondered what the hell they were thinking. He circled Mack, trying to decipher his sad expression. But he couldn’t._

_Then came the experiments. Coulson never liked those much, always feeling like a lab rat. The fact that nobody could see or hear him and that according to science his current existence left no physical trace in the real world didn’t seem to matter. He still didn’t like being the subject of an experiment. It made him remember thing he only half-remembered, being strapped to a surgery table, his body and brain in the hands of doctors acting without his consent._

_The scientists had a million questions. About what it felt to be a ghost. Questions Daisy had to say out loud, in his place. Some he couldn’t really answer: like the one about whether he needed to sleep. Coulson wasn’t sure he was sleeping at all, or just sitting in a corner while Daisy slept, her unconsciousness mixing with his._

_Because he had to be near Daisy, though. The first time she tried to leave on a mission while Coulson stayed in the base he just… disappeared. He didn’t know what happened to him during those hours, just that his existence ceased again. It didn’t feel like dying again, just as if he had missed time he couldn’t account for. The equivalent of a blackout for ghosts, he guessed. Getting used to the word, “ghost”._

_(Daisy, once she was sure Coulson didn’t mind the word, started to make a lot of bad ghost jokes; Coulson knew she was just being Daisy, deflecting with humor as always, but they made him laugh)_

_Daisy freaked out about it, Coulson’s “disappearance” and by that point it was obvious that whatever was happening to him, this ghostly state, was connected to Daisy. It would explain why, when he first appeared in her room he didn’t feel any desire to leave and see if anyone else could hear him, he just felt like he had to talk to Daisy. He was drawn to Daisy. He didn’t think much of it, because that had been the case when he was alive, he thought it was natural that as a ghost he felt the same. Except, there was nothing natural about the whole thing._

_“You think it might be the GH-325?” she wondered._

_Maybe, Coulson replied, but he wasn’t sure they’d ever get a proper explanation. He only knew Daisy felt guilty about it, like she was forcing something on him, in a sense. Coulson, on the other hand, felt the opposite: that whatever chance he had been given to be in the world again, even in this strange state, it was all thanks to Daisy. He wasn’t supposed to be here. She made it possible, even if no one knew how. Or why, for that matter._

_At least he could help her with her missions; even as a ghost Coulson didn’t appreciate idleness. Being able to walk through walls — apparently he’s a classical ghost — was a very neat trick for a SHIELD agents. The only thing he needed was Daisy relatively near and he could get intel from basically anywhere, no matter the security measures._

_“Good thing I don’t show up in camera,” he joked. He was starting to joke._

_“We should have our own tv show,” Daisy said, cheered up by a very good mission outcome that day. “Quake and her ghostly partner.”_

_“Ectoplasm of SHIELD,” he offered._

_Daisy almost snorted the coffee she was drinking. Her bad jokes were starting to get to him and she seemed delighted about it._

_“Whatever this is,” she told him. “It’s good to have you back on the team.”_

_Coulson had to try and remember that he is supposed to be mourning his old life and be tortured or haunted or all those things the unexplainably non-living should be._

_But it didn’t feel like this was not-living to him._

 

+++

 

“Do it again,” Daisy says, her voice thick like honey.

Coulson tries, convinced it was just a fluke, some tiny crack in the universe that allowed him a moment that was real. But he does as Daisy says, and he lifts his hand again and tries to press his fingers against Daisy’s skin once more.

They both gasp at the same time.

He felt it again.

Only stronger this time.

More like… more like he would feel it if he were alive.

“I don’t understand,” he says, looking at his hand once more. He had tried to move objects before, to make himself present to anyone but Daisy. Hell, he had even tried to punch bad guys when he went along with her on missions, just to be more useful.

Nothing had worked.

Until tonight.

“What were you thinking when you did it?” she asks. Coulson can see the familiar light in her intelligent eyes. She is trying to work out a problem, find a exploit. An explanation. Daisy always wants to know.

“Nothing,” he admits. “I was thinking about nothing. Just…”

“Yes?” She takes a step towards him.

“... that I wanted to touch you,” Coulson says. 

Daisy blinks, like she is contemplating that word.

“What were _you_ thinking?” Coulson asks.

“That I… wanted you to touch me?”

Coulson thinks about how he hasn’t minded that his body is… strange now. That his body is disconnected from the world. Perhaps because, when he was alive, or at least in the last few years, he didn’t feel like his body was that connected to the world anyway. But now he wants to feel this again, whatever he did to be able to touch Daisy. It felt like a spark that was about to light something but it fizzled out before he could grasp what it was.

“You think it works the other way around?” Daisy says. “If I try to…”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, she just does it. Reaches out to him. Her fingers wrap carefully around the curve of Coulson’s shoulder and — it’s different. Coulson understands the difference. Touching, being touched. It’s not the same. It’s indescriptible pleasurable, like a relief, and Coulson lets out a long happy sigh.

He doesn’t have any time to analyze the details of it because suddenly he’s in Daisy’s arms and she’s hugging him tight.

Neither can believe _she can_.

“I’ve missed you,” she breathes, like he’s just walked back into her life rather than having spent the last few weeks basically glued together, and it’s not just that he feels the same, he has missed this of course, holding her like this, which he didn’t do as often as he should have while alive, it’s also that he can literally feel her breath on his neck, neither of them is imagining anything, and that shouldn’t be possible, he shouldn’t _literally_ feel anything anymore.

She steps away, letting him go. Her face… Coulson can’t think of a time he’s seen her face like this. So open, so filled with emotion. She still has one hand wrapped around his wrist, like she is afraid of losing all contact, in case… in case what? It stops happening? For some reason Coulson doesn’t think this is going to stop. Ever.

“Maybe you’re coming back?” she says. “Little by little.”

Coulson shakes his head.

“No, I think it’s just you.”

It’s just Daisy.

But then again it’s always been Daisy.

The reason he woke up in her room after dying. The reason he could talk to her and she could hear him. The reason he can touch again…

It’s obvious.

He puts his hand under her chin, tilting her head to the side. He takes a breath he doesn’t really need and leans towards her, putting his lips against hers. For a moment he’s sure it won’t work but…

Daisy laughs.

“I _definitely_ felt that.”

Coulson smiles, feeling a warmth run through him, a warmth that shouldn’t be possible for someone who no longer has a working bloodstream.

“Good,” he says, pulling her back against him again.

Remembering what it felt like, when it was alive: flirting, teasing, falling in love.

He can’t stop kissing her. Maybe being dead has given him more of a craving for what little contact he can get. Most likely it’s just the kissing Daisy part. Though being dead helps, because now he knows what it feels like to lose her. He feels like an idiot, having let that happen. How could he do that to her? To himself? And it’s like the only way he knows to make it up to her and to himself is to keep kissing Daisy.

Suddenly he’s still kissing her but they are on her bed and Coulson is not sure how that happened — did he blackout again? Or more likely it’s the mess of Daisy’s limbs curling around him and pulling him wherever she wants.

He runs his hands over her side, feeling the curve of her ribcage through her shirt, enjoying the rush of being able to touch, the uncertainty of whether he’d be able to do it much longer. He kisses Daisy’s neck, closing his lips over her pulse.

“Don’t stop touching me,” she says, voice raw and full of want.

The idea sobers Coulson a bit. He lifts his head to look at her.

“Daisy…”

Her eyes are darker than ever. Coulson can’t remember the last time someone looked at him like this.

“I want this,” she tells him. “I wanted it even before you died.”

“You never said,” Coulson protest, trying not to be distracted by the way Daisy is cupping his face in her hands. “I never noticed.”

She gives him a sad smile.

“I made sure of that. Because I know it was hopeless.”

She’s probably right, Coulson has to admit. He doesn’t think he could have allowed himself to return those feeling. But being dead is a curious thing — it cuts through a lot of bullshit.

He grabs her hand, presses it against his heart. It’s not beating but it might as well be.

“Touch me,” Coulson pleads with her.

Daisy nods and throws him a little smug smirk.

“I’ve got you,” she tells him.

Coulson tries to remember how it was when he was alive, but he can’t remember it being _this good_ : flirting, teasing, falling in love.

They touch each other through their clothes — Coulson is not sure there’s even a way for him to take off his, though he’s convinced that the ghostly rules can bend when it comes to him and Daisy. Arousal is different, but he has no trouble identifying it when it comes in surprising waves of sudden awareness, of sharpness of feeling and sensation,

“I can’t believe I’m having sex with a ghost,” Daisy says. But she sounds happy. Happier than Coulson has heard her in such a long time. Years.

“I can’t believe I’m having sex with you,” he tells her, truthfully, while he mentally laments all the time he has made her waste.

Daisy throws a leg over his hip and presses, turning Coulson on his back and climbing on top. Straddling him.

Coulson moans when he feels her weight.

She kisses him, drinking the noise.

“It’s a good thing only I can hear you,” she teases him. “These walls are pretty thin.”

He arches up and presses his thigh between her legs, rolling his hips, desperate for friction of his own.

She covers his body with hers, like making sure he is solid, or maybe giving him her soldiness; now that’s a thought, maybe he can only exist when Daisy is near because she gives him existence. The idea would be troubling any other time, but in the middle of helping Daisy get off against his crotch it’s quite intoxicating. Romantic.

He is not sure _he_ reaches an orgasm — further experimentation will be need, to sort out this whole ghostly sex thing, Coulson thinks to himself mischeviously. But he definitely feels it (almost like it’s his own body) when Daisy comes, shaking and laughing and with her hair spilled over Coulson’s face.

They lie in bed afterwards. Coulson holds on to Daisy’s body, wanting to feel as much as he can. He has his arms wrapped around her middle and his head resting against her chest. It’s not the same as when he was alive — the edges of sensation are still a bit blurred. It’s no less intense (jesus was this intense, Coulson thinks, still in awe), but everything is mixed up, the boundary between his body, as it is, and the world ( _and_ Daisy), is not as clear as when he was alive.

It’s different, but that’s not a bad thing.

Daisy chuckles and it’s a current running through him.

“ _Now_ I’m sure I made you up,” she says.

Coulson tightens his grip on her waist, something he wouldn’t have dared do when he was alive. Why was he so afraid of holding on to things? He thinks that maybe it’s the other way around, he has made Daisy up.

She pats the side of his head affectionately, like one would a child.

“We’ll find a way, you know?” Daisy tells him. “To restore or whatever. Make others see you. And make sure you don’t disappear if I leave the room. You’ll see. We’ll find a way.”

Coulson looks at her, thinking it’s Daisy the one who is an anomaly defying the laws of nature here. She really is incapable of a single selfish thought.

He mutters some noise of agreement.

“We will,” he says. “But for now… this is fine.”

Daisy mutters something he can’t figure out at first. His name, she falls asleep with his name in her mouth. Her consciousness slipping, tugging at Coulson to follow her.

Coulson’s not sure if he really sleeps. 

Do ghost sleep? 

He thinks he dreams, this time.


End file.
